Emmanuel levinas biography summary graphic organizer

Lithuanian-French philosopher (1901–1995)

Emmanuel Levinas^[3][4] (born Emanuelis Levinas; ; French:[ɛmanɥɛllevinas];^[5] 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.

Life and career

Levinas was born on 12 January 1906, into a middle-classLitvak family in Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania, then Kovno district, at the Western edge of the Russian Empire. Because of the disruptions of World War I, the family moved to Kharkiv in Ukraine in 1916, where they stayed during the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917.

In 1920, his family returned to the Republic of Lithuania. Levinas's early education was in secular, Russian-language schools in Kaunas and Kharkiv.^[6] Upon his family's return to the Republic o